The back-to-back arrival of "Countdown to Zero" and "Restrepo" — two of this year's finest documentaries — is cause for celebration, even though most moviegoers will greet them as films they should see, not ones they want to see.

The first recounts the history of nuclear-weapons proliferation and the risks it increasingly poses to our geopolitically wobbly world. The second plunges us into a platoon's year-long deployment in one of Afghanistan's most dangerous regions.

As different as they are stylistically and in purpose, they represent the power and the drive of nonfiction filmmakers to engage audiences in the urgent problems of our times. They are better than "good for you." They are very good films. And they are part of a class of well-crafted, often acclaimed documentaries that take seriously the notion of an informed citizenry (though how they inform audiences is not without a point of view).

Photo from "Restrepo," Tim Hetherington. ( | )

They demand that moviegoers go deeper, that they confront fears and interrogate biases — and, yes, that means being mindful of the filmmakers' biases, too.

The films don't hawk "closure." They don't let us walk out of the art house (which is where they are most often found before they move to a cable-television slot) in a state of blissful catharsis.

But they can make us smarter about the many ways visual storytelling works on us, emotionally, intellectually, ethically. They scare. They rattle. They humble. They rally us to want to know more, maybe even do something.

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These films encourage us to think for ourselves. They extend that courtesy more than, say, Michael Moore's clever and aggravating film-essays (though they owe an obvious debt to the maker of "Bowling for Columbine" and "Roger and Me.") They also owe a nod to Errol Morris, director of engaged and artistically exquisite works like "The Thin Blue Line" and "The Fog of War."

For "Restrepo," the filmmakers embedded themselves with soldiers in one of the most dangerous outposts in Afghanistan, the Korengal Valley in Kunar Province.
(Tim Hetherington
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More and more, documentaries augment what's missing from network and cable-television news. Television is the least comprehensive yet most consulted medium for grasping our world. Yet our globe requires greater fortitude and sharper tools to understand.

"Restrepo" opens Friday on the heels of the massive dump of classified documents about the war in Afghanistan to WikiLeaks. With its focus on nuclear-weapons security and intelligence gathering, "Countdown to Zero" (at the Mayan), could be considered supplementary viewing for the recent Washington Post series "Top Secret America," about whether the boom in the post- 9/11 intelligence industry has — or can — make us safer.

Indie marketing departments couldn't have dreamed up better timing.

So while the studios seem stuck in rehash mode with very few "Inceptions," er, exceptions, these documentaries engage the present with an eye to the future.

Nonfiction film is here to stay. That's not the headline. But movies like "Countdown to Zero" and "Restrepo," as well as Davis Guggenheim's education documentary, "Waiting for Superman," due this fall, suggest that popular culture can actually make us better citizens.

That they do this with flair, well, all the better.

A chilling view

Valerie Plame Wilson is the first on-camera interview in "Countdown to Zero," Lucy Walker's elegantly crafted film about the catastrophic risks of nuclear proliferation.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad strolls through a plant in a scene from "Countdown to Zero," a beautifully structured documentary.
(Magnolia Pictures
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The news she shares is chilling. "Al-Qaeda is determined to acquire nuclear weapons and use them if they get them," states the former CIA covert operations officer.

And "Countdown" may well be the most genuinely frightening film of the year. That's not simply because it confronts moviegoers with meetings between Osama bin Laden and Pakistani nuclear scientists just before 9/11, but because it offers worrisome evidence that nuclear disaster could come too easily by way of "accident" or "miscalculation" or "madness," as former President John F. Kennedy told the U.N. General Assembly in 1961.

Although "Countdown" is vividly made, you can hear the Friday-night dilemma: "Honey, should we see a slight comedy starring Steve Carell or a movie about nuclear destruction sure to keep us up at night?" Well, gee.

Wilson gets it. "Scared the hell out of you?" she says over the phone. Reality, she admits, is harsh.

Many Americans "grew up with a Cold War paradigm in which the doctrine of mutually assured destruction acted as an effective deterrent," she says. "The chances of us going to war with Russia these days are pretty much nil. But the possibility that terrorists could get their hands on a nuclear weapon is much more in the realm of possibility."

Wilson says she leapt at the chance to use the expertise she'd gained working on national security issues "in a way I thought was worthwhile without a lot of partisan background noise."

She also was attracted to the fact that Participant Media — the movie's backer and maker of "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Food, Inc." — "believes in the power of film to make social change.

"We don't want to scare people into inaction," Wilson says. "As an individual, it's very easy to feel helpless and intimidated, especially about something like this. There's an entire social campaign built around the film."

As it did with "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Food, Inc." Participant Media, in partnership with the World Security Institute, has built a Web- based initiative to harness the pent-up curiosity and anxious energy its film may engender.

"It's very gloomy, but we all wouldn't have signed on to do this if we didn't think there was hope," Wilson says.

In soldiers' footsteps

"Restrepo" is perhaps as unlike "Countdown to Zero" as a movie can be. But it, too, aims to build a smarter citizen.

Gritty and pared-down, the Afghanistan war documentary was directed by embedded journalists (and first-time filmmakers) Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington.

Its mission, says Junger on the phone, is not to be "informative or instructive. And it certainly doesn't take a position or tackle an issue."

Instead, "It's experiential the way Hollywood movies are. You step into that reality, and you exist in it for 90 minutes."

The reality the filmmakers capture is that of the young men of the 2nd Platoon of the 173rd Airborne, stationed in the craggy, treacherous Korengal Valley starting in 2007.

There are no talking-head experts. No interviews with military honchos or families. The only formal interviews took place in Italy after the soldiers' tour of duty ended.

The documentary takes its name from a remote outpost established on a spur overlooking a steep incline. The encampment itself was named to honor Pfc. Juan "Doc" Restrepo, who was killed in action two months into the platoon's tour. His was the second death. (In April, the U.S. pulled out of the valley, where 42 soldiers had died and many more were wounded.)

As praise was building for "Restrepo" at January's Sundance Film Festival, Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq drama, "The Hurt Locker," was gaining steam as it headed for its eventual Oscar win for best picture.

A funny line gained currency as fans of one film referenced the other to buttress their praise.

"We kept hearing that we were "the real 'Hurt Locker,' " says Junger with a short laugh. At the time, he thought, " 'OK, if that's a reference point people need in order to be interested in our film, that's fine.' And it served our purposes, but it just said something funny about how people perceive reality and perceive Hollywood." And, of course, how people perceive war.

"Hollywood has such a lock on producing the myths of our culture," he says. "Because so few people have experienced war, their understanding of war comes from Los Angeles." The scripted takes the place of reality.

"I'm interested in the human consequences of war," says Junger, who has covered conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Liberia. "This typically meant chronicling the impact of war on civilians."

"Restrepo" does this, too. "Only this time they're soldiers. What's the impact of war on the soldiers themselves?"

As gripping as "Hurt Locker" is, the film is actually an exquisite meditation on the myths of heroism and masculinity, the very ideals movies so often fuel.

Junger believes that "when people say 'Restrepo' is the real 'Hurt Locker,' they're remembering there is a reality that exists outside of the one created by Hollywood."

By simply, fiercely reminding audiences that soldiers are people, not emblems or lone gunslingers in the parched streets of Iraq, the documentary provides a profound service.

"We need to understand them as people," says Junger. It helps us understand what they experienced — the boredom, the fear, the grief.

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